The present invention relates to the field of FLASH presentation encoding and, more particularly, to using an extensible markup language (XML) based encoding language for expressing FLASH presentations.
FLASH presentations are a popular medium for visually presenting a variety of content to an audience. However, the creation process for FLASH presentations often requires the author to have technical knowledge of the FLASH specification used to encode the presentation. Due to the technical nature of creating FLASH presentations, additional authoring tools are required to assist a user during the creation process, such as less technical user interfaces that provide a level of abstraction between the user's input and the FLASH language specification.
The result of the current FLASH presentation creation process generates a FLASH file having a .SWF extension, which is encoded in accordance with a FLASH specification. The user-input data about the FLASH presentation is stored in source files having a .FLA extension that the authoring tool compiles into the .SWF file. Since a .SWF file is compiled, a user is unable to modify the FLASH presentation without modifying the original source files and recompiling the .SWF file. Thus, a presenter having just the FLASH presentation file is unable to make “on-the-fly” changes without access to the authoring tool and source files.
Issues regarding versioning and authoring tool incompatibilities tend to arise should the presenter gain access to a secondary authoring tool to modify the FLASH presentation. Should the presenter open the .SWF file to attempt to examine its contents in the hopes of making the necessary modification, they are presented with an unreadable assemblage of code. Thus, the conventional approach for encoding FLASH presentations restricts the portability and flexibility of FLASH presentations.